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The rise of the splinternet

THE internet is different in North Korea. The world’s most secretive nation severely restricts access to the web in a bid to control what its people learn about the seething world outside and prevent them talking freely to each other.

Yet the people of the rest of the world do not all see the same internet either. It is being balkanised by huge corporations (see “Welcome to the age of the splinternet”). Technology giants such as Google, Apple and Facebook are dividing the net up into “walled gardens”, fenced off from each other by proprietary technology, intellectual property laws …